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At the Columbia Association, visitors find not only a place to work out, swim, or enjoy the great outdoors, but a place to connect with the local community and get to know their neighbors. Families take in live music by the lakefront during summer festivals, or glide across the ice at the public rink. Meanwhile, aspiring athletes build muscle, flexibility, and
form with practice at indoor and outdoor tennis courts, or regular trips to the high-tech Columbia Gym.
Columbia Association also helps its members maintain a healthy lifestyle with a wide variety of facilities, including nearby golf courses, 23 swimming pools, and even an attached horse center, where humans can learn to ride and horses can get in shape for
swimsuit season.

CEO Peter Harvey believes that a quality gym staff must demonstrate more than technical expertise. "Service doesn't only mean showing someone how to do an arm curl," he says. Certified personal trainers develop workouts that zero in on each person?s specific goals, giving clients the skills to pole-vault over impassable plateaus. By steadfastly refusing to hand out fish in favor of putting on master classes in fishing, they help clients become self-sufficient, educating them on fundamentals.
During these one-on-one sessions, and in solo workouts, guests set calories ablaze atop rows of continually updated equipment. Treadmills, recumbent bikes, and strength-training tools line the walls.
Members can also drop in for as many group classes as they can muster. Inside a separate studio, stationary cycles whir in time with galvanizing music, kickboxing strikes arc through the air, and barbells rise with each BodyPump rep. For more meditative practices, Pilates sessions and several types of yoga enhance flexibility and focus.

Exercisers head to Snap Fitness's 24/7 fitness haven to work up a sweat on dozens of cardio and weight-training machines. With a 30-day membership, muscle constructors enjoy unlimited access to Snap’s facilities, from a room stocked with free weights and benches to a cardio theater area where 42-inch LCD TVs deck the walls. Newly minted members undergo a pair of one-hour personal-training sessions, during which they develop a custom fitness program under the tutelage of a certified conditioning guru. The global-access card allows members to carve scenic ridges into their physiques at any Snap Fitness center across the nation so that they don’t have to bench-press their cars while on road trips. This package also includes a free water bottle as well as a pair of two-week passes to dole out to family members, friends, or extremely motivated house pets.

ScienZminds engineers build armies of robots every day, but they don’t pose much danger to humanity—even children can control them. Which they do. Using Lego kits, sensors, motors, and age-appropriate programming software, elementary- and middle-school students fashion bots that interact with the world around them and carry out instructions. Beyond the robots, ScienZminds’ educators lead several other classes that get kids excited about science, math, technology, and engineering. For instance, an electronics course uses circuit boards to build devices including an organ that reacts to light and a lie detector to help figure out which parent really ate the Halloween candy.

It's easy to think of artists as solitary people locked away in their studios—Mark Rothko withdrawing to obsess over the interplay between his blockish swaths of color or Jackson Pollock dangling a dripping brush over a canvas on the floor of an empty room. This is the exact opposite experience Michele Foshee wants people to have at artventureUs! An accomplished designer with clients including National Geographic and the White House, Michele sees painting as an engaging social experience where friends and complete strangers can share an adventure as they paint both original pieces and re-creations of famous works, such as Gustav Klimt's The Kiss.
Some classes include wine, and students don’t need experience, since Michele and her instructors take a step-by-step approach to teaching the basics of working with acrylic paints. They also furnish participants with every supply they'll need from a closet full of aprons, canvases, Greek muses, and paintbrushes. In addition to leading public classes, the team at artventureUs! organizes private painting parties.

My Gym, which currently has more than 200 international locations, began more than 20 years ago as a structured place for children to safely play, acquire new skills, and romp off a sugar buzz. All classes are organized according to age level?starting as young as 6 months?and designed to incorporate the latest physiological and psychological research. Tiny Tykes gets babies moving with help from their parents, Mighty Mites teaches toddlers self-reliance and beginning sports skills, and Champions, a class for kids aged 6 to 9, emphasizes the importance of using teamwork to master more complex sports skills and achieve group goals such as building a human pyramid to reach the cookie jar. My Gym's energetic instructors are experts at using music, dance, and gymnastics to build youngsters' strength and self-esteem while stimulating their giggle-plexes. The noncompetitive environment fosters creativity, and hands-on activities boost children's learning retention and fun quotient.